The jazz is hot, the romance is not so hot in Martin
Ritt's
("Edge
of the City"/"Norma Rae") film about American
expatriates Ram Bowen
(Paul
Newman) and Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier) playing in the
same jazz
band in Paris (filmed in Paris). The middlebrow drama
never has a sense
of where it's going and what it wants to say about
music, racism or
love
relationships. Poitier nailed it on the head when he
said "All wrong
from
beginning to end."

Ram Bowen is a trombone player and Eddie Cook a
tenor man
in the
same jazz band. Ram is studying music and
aspiring to be a
"serious"
composer, while Eddie escapes American racism to be in
a city that
respects
the love he has for his kind of music. American
tourists Connie Lampson
(Diahann Carroll) and Lillian Corning (Joanne
Woodward) are on a
two-week
holiday in Paris and begin a casual romantic fling
with the two jazz
men
that turns more serious as the days go by. It becomes
a question if Ram
will leave his music to return home to be with Lillian
and will Eddie
also
return home because his love for Connie is so great.

On the plus side there's the wonderful score by Duke
Ellington and
Louis Armstrong's amazing rendition of "Battle Royal."
Otherwise it's
dross.
The film never gets around to probing America's racism
that caused many
blacks to seek shelter in the much friendlier confines
of the City of
Lights,
as it instead focuses around the white Newman
character's uninteresting
problem if he's good enough to be a serious musician
and still cut it
as
a jazz man. I got the blues after seeing this turkey.